Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[mikro]

Poking directly at the videocard like it's the 1990's.
It's not pretty going behind the drivers back but for fullscreen exclusive things I regret nothing :lol:
That videomode is a must-have for me :)

Not only for you. ;) Maybe try to contact "Idek Tramielski" on AF, whether he couldn't include that code into the drivers?

[agranlund]

Pretty cool indeed what you can do with a Mach card:

His videos are great stuff indeed!
I'm pretty sure the Nova driver is taking good advantage of the Mach32 accelerants for VDI calls since it's so very fast.
For hardware triangles in something like a game or demo I suspect it might make sense to do it on a low level to avoid potential VDI overhead?

But I think what I most would really like to get a chance to experiment with is using the et4000/w32i blitter in game scenarios.

[agranlund]

Not only for you. ;) Maybe try to contact "Idek Tramielski" on AF, whether he couldn't include that code into the drivers?

That's a great idea! I'll do that once it's more presentable and cleaned up.

[mikro]

For hardware triangles in something like a game or demo I suspect it might make sense to do it on a low level to avoid potential VDI overhead?

But I think what I most would really like to get a chance to experiment with is using the et4000/w32i blitter in game scenarios.

Yes, this would be great, wouldn't it. For me, from a game/demo making point of view, the biggest issue with those cards is that we don't have any API (well, except VDI...) to make them shine. OpenGL is for 3D, VDI is for desktop stuff (and uses maybe 10% of the card's capabilities) so we would need to steal something from ancient Linux/Unix world or invent something on our own (and hope that it would be attractive enough for others to use). The latter was tried by Didier but it didn't end very well.

[peters]

There's some chat about 3d gfx in the vampire/Atari discord channel.

[Oldskool]

All this talk about fancy pancy graphics acceleration and 3d these young kids nowadays want. In my time…..
Although it would be nice to see this 3D Raven on a Raven if we are talking demos.
But that’s probably more a sound xbios thingie holding mikro back.

IMG_1810.jpeg

[mikro]

There's nothing technical which would prevent this demo from working except the requirement of having 50 Hz screen refresh rate (yup, Amiga coders still sync their demos to VBL interrupt). It's true that I'd need to make a new build (remove C2P, perhaps create a custom video init) but that's not a showstopper.

Btw, if I had to port that demo today, I would have built it around SDL and it would work immediately (well, except the refresh rate issue) on every Atari clone.

[danboid]

For hardware triangles in something like a game or demo I suspect it might make sense to do it on a low level to avoid potential VDI overhead?

But I think what I most would really like to get a chance to experiment with is using the et4000/w32i blitter in game scenarios.

Yes, this would be great, wouldn't it. For me, from a game/demo making point of view, the biggest issue with those cards is that we don't have any API (well, except VDI...) to make them shine. OpenGL is for 3D, VDI is for desktop stuff (and uses maybe 10% of the card's capabilities) so we would need to steal something from ancient Linux/Unix world or invent something on our own (and hope that it would be attractive enough for others to use). The latter was tried by Didier but it didn't end very well.

Isn't there already a TOS or MiNT port of SDL? I think so although my ST can't run it so I've not tried it.

Adding support for the best supported Raven compat card to (a fork of) SDL2 maybe? I'm not so sure upstream would want to integrate such niche retro hardware but surely SDL2 would bring the largest amount of open source software to the Raven above anything else out there?

[danboid]

If not SDL, how about adding Raven support to raylib?

https://www.raylib.com/

https://github.com/raysan5/raylib

[Oldskool]

@danboid
Yep:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL-1.2/b ... EADME.MiNT

The Mikro guy knows all about it :)